Franconian Dialects Research Articles

Soziopragmatik von unser bei Rufnamen im Westmitteldeutschen.

Speakers of Western Central German dialects frequently use the first person plural form of the possessive article unser with proper names (e. g. us Dietmar ‘our Dietmar’). But conditions of use are so far totally unclear. This paper focuses on form and use of unser with proper names in Moselle Franconian dialects. The findings are based on interviews. They show that unser is primarily used to refer to blood relatives. However, consanguinity is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for unser. In particular, its use is triggered by social closeness and the assumption of responsibility by the speaker.

Tones in Danish dialects compared with Low German and Franconian tones

The article deals with tonal differences in Danish, northern Low German, and Franconian dialects, which appeared after the apocope. Dissyllabic words and forms become monosyllabic, but they continue to differ due to differences in accents: CVC — CVCV > CVC1 — CVC2, as in /hu.’s/ n. sg. hus ‘house’ — /hu.sә/ n. pl. huse ‘houses’ > /hu.s1/ — /hu.s2/ in Southern Jutlandic, /hu.s/ n.sg. nom/acc. Haus ‘house’ — /hu.sә/ Hause ‘house’ dat. sg. > /hu.s1/ — /hu.s2/ in northern Low German dialects and /haus/ n. sg. nom./acc. Haus ‘house’ — /hausә/ dat. sg. Hause ‘house’ > /haus1/ — /haus2/ in Franconian Arzbach dialect. The appearance of such tonal differences is associated with a sharp increase in monosyllabic words. The development in the Danish apocopated dialects has much in common with the development in northern Low German and Franconian dialects. It concerns not only the appearance of tones due to the apocope and the same lexical and morphological distribution of the accents in related words and forms (see above), but even the spread of the accent of apocope to original monosyllabic words with a special phonemic basis (spontaneous accentuation), the long phonetic duration of which was realized by the speakers as an accent of the apocope. Tonal differences of root morphemes, along with the coincidence of the root with the syllable and with the increase of the difference between syllable-initial and syllablefinal consonants, turn out to be one of the most important means of segmentation of the root morpheme in a text. The question is also raised about the possible contact nature of the apocope and of the appearance of the tonal differences.

Jean de Joinville and the Old French rhotic consonant

Abstract Based on textual evidence from Jean de Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, this article argues that the Old French rhotic consonant /r/ had a dorsal pronunciation for at least some groups of medieval Francophones. This argument counters the prevailing view that medieval French /r/ was uniformly apical, and that the now-standard dorsal pronunciation only emerged in the early modern period. The article then develops the hypothesis that dorsal /r/ came into Old French as a result of Germanic influence, and not as a spontaneous development. For this purpose, it first surveys the current state of the debate about the origins of dorsal /r/ in the Germanic languages and evaluates the merits of its principal arguments in the light of Joinville’s testimony. The article then advances a sociolinguistic argument in favor of the Germanic-origins hypothesis. Using the available evidence for the interactions between Germanic- and Romance-speakers at the dawn of the written French language, it proposes that Carolingian-era nobles who were native speakers of Franconian dialects brought this pronunciation of /r/ into Old French, and that this sound subsequently persisted in some Old French aristocratic speech as part of a prestige accent.

Analysing case in spoken language: A corpus study on East Franconian dialects

Analysing case in spoken language: A corpus study on East Franconian dialects

Dem Herrgott sei Scheenster

AbstractBy integrating dialect data into typological theses on dative-marked nominal possessive constructions of the typedem Vater sein Hut, this article will continue recent approaches of both dialectological and typological research. By means of an empirical study, this article intends to not only describe the surface phenomena, but to uncover the underlying structure of this construction in East Franconian dialects. Language maps illustrate that instances of microvariation concerning the case-marking of the possessor (Wemvs.Wenvs.Wer seine Weiden sind das?) and the form of the possessive pronoun (meiner Tante ihrvs.sein Wirsing) are diatopically conditioned.

The Evolution of the Definite Article in Old High German

This paper is an investigation of the early use of the Old High German demonstrative as a definite article. Previous work has often failed to take into account the many ways that the definite article can be employed or the fact that new grammatical structures sometimes evolve over great lengths of time. This paper discusses the evolutionary process and stages of article use in three individual OHG documents, the Isidor translation, the Tatian translation, and Otfrid's Evangelien-buch, the three longest OHG documents in Franconian dialects. It proposes that a definite article did exist from the earliest recorded examples of OHG although with differing uses at different times (and places).*

Old Franconian and Middle Dutch <gh> and Velar Palatalization

Our understanding of the relative chronology and linguistic geography of velar palatalization in West Germanic remains limited. A major obstacle is the lack of evidence for the earlier stages of the western Franconian dialects. An examination of the origins of the spelling <gh>, common in medieval Dutch as well as in the Old High German Isidor, reveals a relationship with velar palatalization. The view that <gh> goes back to Merovingian Latin and that its later use in Middle Dutch is a borrowing of an Old French spelling practice is untenable. Instead, the spelling is an internal development by Germanic scribes of an established model with diacritical <h> inherited from Latin. If Gmc. *g in the western Franconian dialects is analyzed as a voiced velar fricative, then the distinction <g ~ gh> points to an opposition between velar and palatalized reflexes of Gmc. *g.

Syntactic Language Change in a German Dialect: Replacement or Reanalysis of a Construction?

Abstract This article discusses a type of prepositional construction that is highly characteristic for a group of East Franconian dialects, located in the south-eastern part of Germany. The construction expresses local relations and contrasts with the standard German construction as well as with the regional standard of this area. Based on spontaneous spoken dialect material, the article reveals an ongoing process of change: among young adults today not only the standard variant but also occasional hybrid formations are used as replacements for the original, the latter functioning as membership-markers to this dialectal community.

Enhancing the durational enhancement of a tone contrast

In central and low Franconian dialects of German and Dutch, a lexical tone contrast (accent 1 versus accent 2) exists that is enhanced by a durational difference. While pitch differences vary according to intonation and sentence context, syllables are generally shorter when they have accent 1. In addition, vowels in those syllables are more open, in comparison with vowels in syllables with accent 2. Perception experiments with natural vowels whose acoustic durations had been manipulated revealed that high vowels are perceived as longer by Dutch listeners than midvowels when acoustic durations are equal. It is argued that vowel raising of longer vowels, or vowel lowering of shorter vowels, serves as an enhancement of duration differences. The tendency is widely attested to in the vowel systems of Germanic languages, where short (‘‘lax’’) vowels are opener than long (‘‘tense’’) vowels, and vowel height is used to enhance a phonological duration contrast. In the dialects investigated, vowel height is manipulated to enhance a durational difference, which in turn enhances a tonal contrast. The explanation of the durational illusion of vowel height is the listener’s compensation of the universally shorter duration of higher vowels.

English in Contact with Pennsylvania German

The Pennsylvania Germans (also commonly known as the Pennsylvania Dutch) provide an interesting paradigm of the nature of language contact because within the total Pennsylvania German community is enmeshed a variety of subgroups, each having a different relation to the dominant culture. The Pennsylvania German community is not one community, culturally or linguistically, and this diversity is reflected in the nature and extent of the languages used by the various communities which comprise the whole Pennsylvania German group. The Pennsylvania Germans began arriving in America as early as 1683. The German dialect they brought with them resembles most closely the Franconian dialects of the Rhenish Palatinate with some Alemanic influences.' This dialect continues to be spoken natively by many Pennsylvania Germans today, especially by the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites, who form a small but highly visible percentage of the total Pennsylvania German population. Members of the Old Order sects (the plain people) generally learn English in school and use it in school and when speaking to outsiders. Old Order religious rites and ceremonies are conducted in a form of High German which is essentially the eighteenthcentury literary German of their Bible and hymnal. No one converses in this High German form, and most Old Order people have only a passive knowledge of it. It is recited with Pennsylvania German phonology. Pennsylvania German is the main language used within plain families and communities, the language which is passed on to children as their mother tongue. Less conservative Amish and Mennonites tend to use more English in their daily lives and religious services than do the Old Orders, and this parallels their greater accommodation of the dominant culture in terms of life style.